PositiveFriezeNew Dark Age: James Bridle’s Lovecraft-Inspired Prologue to the End of the World ... Bridle lucidly argues how our enthusiasm for, and reliance on technology is working against us by undermining our ability to reliably anticipate future risks. The ominous horizon of our new dark age is our blind devotion to computation and its predictive capabilities ... There’s a politely insistent temperament through New Dark Age, but in the last two chapters you feel Bridle’s ire. One segment describes a burgeoning but questionable industry on YouTube...There’s always been something weird about children’s television shows, but the age of self-publishing and YouTube allows for vast, unaccountable manipulation of its weirdness. At the sinister end of the spectrum are trolls creating gore-inflected, violent versions of this assumedly child-friendly content, hoping to worm into the same feeds as the benign originals ... These unregulated channels have billions of views – likely watched by kids who have been plonked in front of screens by parents...and to expose young children to violent and disturbing scenes is a form of abuse,’ writes Bridle.
